On this week's podcast, Productivity & Success Transformation Coach Craig Ballantyne, stops by the show to talk about how to beat anxiety to create your perfect day. Craig is a fitness expert and the author of the groundbreaking fat loss workout systems, Turbulence Training, and Home Workout Revolution. He has been a contributing author to Men's Health magazine since 2000 and has been the editor of the personal development newsletter, Early to Rise, since 2011.

Understanding Your Own Anxiety

Suffering from anxiety shouldn’t make you feel like a black sheep.

In fact, many people that you know may suffer from some form of anxiety because 40 million Americans (18% of population) that are over the age of 18 face it each day. Some of these anxiety disorders include panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, or major depressive disorder.

To beat your anxiety, you can change your mindset today.

On this planet, every minute counts and in order to get the most out of each day of our lives, we have to get in the right mindset to take it head on as best as we can by changing our habits.

Just like a fitness transformation, we need to make specific changes in order to see a mindset transformation. A new mindset transformation won’t only help us beat anxiety, but it will also help us become more goal driven and productive as well.

How to Follow the Perfect Day Formula

According to Craig, in order to begin following the Perfect Day Formula, we need to do The 3 C’s each day:

Control the morning

Conquer the afternoon

Concentrate on what really matters

The First C: You have the greatest control of your day during the morning hours.

Before you leave the house, your morning is your time to focus on how you can get ahead in the day. Even if it’s just for 15 minutes before everyone wakes up, you control everything that you do.

Start your day on a positive note to help you feel energized and focused with less stress by reading the newspaper, drinking some coffee, or watching the sunrise. Do anything that will help you clear your mind.

The Second C: Conquer your afternoon with the 5 Pillars of Personal Transformation.

Life is extremely unpredictable and anything can happen at the drop of a hat to throw us off course from our perfect day. Fortunately, with the 5 Pillars of Personal Transformation, we can better prepare ourselves for any emergencies, negative thoughts, or feelings of anxiety that may come our way.

The 5 Pillars of Personal Transformation

Plan and Prepare for any obstacles or emergencies that come into your life.

Professional Accountability: Look to someone to hold you accountable for your actions and bring out the best in you.

Positive Social Support: Who are your cheerleaders? These are the people that are always there for you and will help push you to do better.

Meaningful Incentive: Have a big enough reason for why you’re doing what you’re doing i.e. for your children or your health.

The Big Deadline: Set a deadline for the big and small goals during the day.

“A goal without a deadline is just a dream.” – Craig Ballantyne

The Third C: Concentrate on what really matters by creating a vision for yourself

In order to truly focus on your dreams, you need to create a vision for your life. This will help you understand where you want to go, how you want to get there, and help you make the right decisions overall. For the majority of us, that means creating structure in your life, but a lot of us don’t like structure. So what can we do?

If you know exactly where you want to go, you can get there without any distractions when you follow your own rules.

Instead of seeing structure as something that is holding you back from having the freedom to make your own decisions, structure can be extremely liberating. How you may ask? Well, isn’t following your own rules a lot easier and less stressful than following someone else’s orders?

Why Your Perfect Day Starts With The Goodnight Formula

Your Perfect Day already begins 10 hours before you go to bed when you should be refraining from drinking any type of caffeine. Some people may be able to drink coffee or other caffeinated beverages at night, but for the majority of us, it can really affect our sleep cycle.

As the day continues on, at 3 hours beforehand, you should not eat any heavy meals or drink alcohol. If you go to bed with alcohol in your system, you will most likely wake up feeling even more tired than you did the night before.

To help you begin to relax more and not be stressed before you sleep, you should stop doing any type of work activity 2 hours before bed. At 1 hour left to go, it’s time to put away the electronics, turn off the TV, and avoiding looking at your phone’s screen.

Whether or not you had a great night’s rest, zero is the number of times that you should hit the snooze button in the morning. If you allow yourself to fall back into a sleep cycle, it will be even more difficult for you to get up and enjoy your 15 free minutes to take control of your perfect day.

How To Know If It’s Time For You To Change Your Environment & Relationships

Whether they realize it or not, our friends, family members, and coworkers can sabotage our formula for a perfect day.

When we’re trying to create the perfect day for ourselves by following the 3 C’s, the Five Pillars, and the Goodnight Formula, we can face different challenges. To get through them, we need to have the best support system that we can possible have from the people in our lives.

These are that people that are there for you no matter what with their love, support, and kindness. Unfortunately, they can also sabotage us sometimes.

To move forward and grow, we may have to change our environments. It may not be forever, but if you have a goal in mind, you may have to change your schedule and your activities to reach your goal. You don’t have to leave people behind, but this may also mean that you have to change the environment you’re in if you truly want to see yourself improve each day.

If you’re in a toxic relationship that does not allow you to grow in anyway at all, you might have to give the gift of goodbye. That way, you can create space to allow new people into your life who will support your goals and hold you accountable for them.

What Not To Do During Your Perfect Day

When we face anxiety, we may follow negative habits that are holding us back from having a perfect day. Craig gave us so much great advice on what we should be doing to beat anxiety and create a perfect day, but he also has a Do Not Do List of what we should not be doing:

Do not hit the snooze button.

Do not check your email first thing in the morning.

Do not answer all phone calls.

Do not mindlessly surf the Internet.

Do not waste time arguing or gossiping.

Do not consume food or drink that makes you tired.

These are some good tips to help you create a perfect day, but what about your own unique list?

How can you be less distracted and more productive during the day?

Take some time to write down what you’re doing each day and discover when you’re distracted and when you’re productive during the day. That way, you can create your own Do Not Do List and focus on the most important tasks you need to complete during your productive time.

More About Craig

Craig Ballantyne is a Productivity & Success Transformation Coach from Toronto, Ontario, Canada,and the author of The Perfect Day Formula: How to Own the Day and Control Your Life. He has been contributing to Men's Health magazine since 2000, and in 2001, Craig created the popular home workout program, Turbulence Training.

On his journey to success, Craig had to overcome crippling anxiety attacks, and he beat them with his 5 Pillars of Transformation. Today Craig shows men and women how to use the 5 Pillars to lose 10 to 75 pounds, get a raise and make more money, find the love of their life, and overcome any obstacle in the way of success. You can read his daily essays on success, productivity, and fitness at EarlyToRise.com

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Lauren Bryant is the Podcasting Assistant and Show Notes Writer for Wellness Force Radio. She has a BBA in both Marketing and Spanish for Business as well as certificates in Advanced Business Communications and International Business from the University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire.

Lauren’s wellness journey began at a young age when she joined her local YMCA swim team, The Wave, of La Crosse, WI. One of the most profound views on wellness that anyone has said to her was when she was an assistant swim coach for that same YMCA swim team.

One day during a practice, former head swim coach, Jon Brenner, shared with her that the most important thing about coaching the swimmers was that “It doesn’t matter if they become the best athletes in the world. What’s important is that we give them the tools and guidance they need to live a healthy, active lifestyle for the rest of their lives.”

Since hearing those words, she has taken it to heart to not only focus on continuously living her own healthy lifestyle, but to help others pursue their wellness goals as well.

Lauren is not only an avid swimmer, but a fan of running, yoga, cooking, and doing any activity outside that involves being surrounded by nature. In the Fall of 2014, she completed a long-awaited goal of walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain.

According to Lauren, wellness is about finding gratitude and joy in doing any type of physical or self-care activity that we love. Wellness means providing ourselves with self-love, good nutrition, and the inner peace that our individual minds and bodies need.